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A prisoner of war (POW,
PoW, PW, P/W,
WP, or PsW) or enemy
prisoner of war (EPW) is a combatant who is held in continuing custody by an
enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The
earliest recorded usage of the phrase is dated 1660.

Reasons for continuing custody

According to John Hickman, captor
states hold captured combatants and non-combatants in continuing
custody for a range of legitimate and illegitimate reasons. They
are held to isolate them from combatants still in the field, to
release and repatriate them in an orderly manner after hostilities,
to demonstrate military victory, to punish them, to prosecute them
for war crimes, to exploit them for their labor, to recruit or even
conscript them as their own combatants, to collect military and
political intelligence from them, and to indoctrinate them in new
political or religious beliefs.

Ancient times

For most of human history, depending on the culture of the victors,
combatants on the losing side in a battle could expect to be either
slaughtered, to eliminate them as a future threat, or enslaved,
bringing economic and social benefits to the victorious side and
its soldiers. Typically, little distinction was made between
combatants and civilians, although women and children were more
likely to be spared. Sometimes the purpose of a battle, if not a
war, was to capture women, a practice known as raptio; the Rape
of the Sabines was a large mass abduction by the founders of
Rome. Typically women had no rights,
were held legally as chattel, and would not
be accepted back by their birth families once they had borne
children to those who had killed their mothers, brothers and
fathers.

In the Fourth Century AD, the Bishop Acacius of Amida, touched by the plight of
Persian prisoners captured in a recent war with the Roman Empire -
who were held in his town under appalling conditions, and destined
for a life of slavery - took the initiative of ransoming them, by
selling his church's precious gold and silver vessels, and letting
them return to their country. For this he was eventually canonised
- which testifies to his act being exeptional.

Likewise the distinction between POW and slave is not always clear.
Some of the Native
Americans captured Europeans and used them as both labourers
and bargaining chips; see for example John R.Jewitt,
an Englishman who wrote a memoir about his years as a captive of
the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest Coast in
1802–1805.

Middle Ages

During
Childeric's siege and blockade of
Paris in 464, the
nun Geneviève (later canonised as the
city's Patron Saint) pleaded with the Frankish King for the welfare
of prisoners of war, and met with a favorable response.
Later, Clovis I liberated captives after
Genevieve urged him to do so.

In the later Middle Ages, a number of
religious wars were particularly
ferocious. In Christian Europe, the
extermination of the heretics or
"non-believers" was considered desirable. Examples include the 13th
century Albigensian Crusade and
the Northern Crusades. Likewise
the inhabitants of conquered cities were frequently massacred
during the Crusades against the Muslims in the 11th century and the 12th century.
Noblemen could hope to be ransomed; their families would have to send to their
captors large sums of wealth commensurate with the social status of
the captive. Many French prisoners of war were killed
during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.In the samurai-dominated Japan there was no
custom of ransoming prisoners of war, who were for the most part
summarily executed.

In pre-Islamic Arabia, upon
capture, those captives not executed, were made to beg for their
subsistence. During the early
reforms under Islam, Muhammad changed
this custom and made it the responsibility of the Islamic government to provide food and clothing, on
a reasonable basis, to captives, regardless of their religion. If
the prisoners were in the custody of a person, then the
responsibility was on the individual. He established the rule that
prisoners of war must be guarded and not ill-treated, and that
after the fighting was over, the prisoners were expected to be
either released or ransomed. However, the leader of the Muslim
force capturing non-Muslim prisoners could choose whether to kill
prisoners, to ransom them, to enslave them, or to cut off their
hands and feet on alternate sides. The freeing of prisoners in
particular was highly recommended as a charitable act. Mecca was the
first city to have the benevolent code applied. However,
Christians who were captured in the Crusades were sold into slavery
if they could not pay a ransom.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia,
which ended the Thirty Years' War,
established the rule that prisoners of war should be released
without ransom at the end of hostilities and that they should be
allowed to return to their homelands.

Modern times

During the 19th century, efforts increased to improve the treatment
and processing of prisoners. The extensive period of conflict
during the Revolutionary War and
Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815),
followed by the Anglo-AmericanWar of 1812, led to the emergence of a
cartel system for the exchange of prisoners, even while the
belligerents were at war. A cartel was
usually arranged by the respective armed service for the exchange
of like ranked personnel. The aim was to achieve a reduction in the
number of prisoners held, while at the same time alleviating
shortages of skilled personnel in the home country.

Later, as result of these emerging conventions a number of
international conferences were held, starting with the Brussels
Conference of 1874, with nations agreeing that it was necessary to
prevent inhumane treatment of prisoners and the use of weapons
causing unnecessary harm. Although no agreements were immediately
ratified by the participating nations, work was continued that
resulted in new conventions being adopted and
becoming recognized as international
law, that specified that prisoners of war are required to be
treated humanely and diplomatically.

Hague and Geneva Conventions

Specifically, Chapter II of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention
covered the treatment of prisoners of war in detail. These were
further expanded in the Third
Geneva Convention of 1929, and its revision of 1949.Article 4
of the Third Geneva
Convention protects captured military
personnel, some guerrilla fighters
and certain civilians. It applies from the moment a prisoner is
captured until he or she is released or repatriated. One of the
main provisions of the convention makes it illegal to torture prisoners and states that a prisoner can
only be required to give their name, date of birth, rank and
service number (if applicable).

However, nations vary in their dedication to
following these laws, and historically the treatment of POWs has
varied greatly. During the 20th century, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were notorious for atrocities
against prisoners during World War II. The German military
used the Soviet Union's refusal to sign the Geneva Convention as a
reason for not providing the necessities of life to Russian POWs.
North Korean and North and South Vietnamese forces routinely killed
or mistreated prisoners taken during those conflicts.

Qualifications

To be entitled to prisoner-of-war status, captured service members
must be lawful combatants entitled to
combatant's privilege—which gives them immunity from punishment for
crimes constituting lawful acts of war, e.g., killing enemy troops.
To qualify under the Third Geneva Convention, a combatant must have
conducted military operations according to the laws and customs of war, be part of a
chain of command, wear a "fixed
distinctive marking, visible from a distance" and bear arms openly.
Thus, uniforms and/or badges are important in determining
prisoner-of-war status; andfrancs-tireurs, terrorists, saboteurs,
mercenaries and spies do not qualify.In practice, these criteria
are not always interpreted strictly. Guerrillas, for example, do not necessarily wear
an issued uniform nor carry arms openly, yet captured combatants of
this type have sometimes been granted POW status. The criteria are
generally applicable to internationalarmed conflicts. In civil wars, insurgents
are often treated as traitors or criminals by government forces,
and are sometimes executed. However, in the American Civil War, both sides treated
captured troops as POWs, presumably out of reciprocity, though the Union regarded Confederacy personnel as
separatist rebels. However, guerrillas and other irregular
combatants generally cannot expect to simultaneously benefit from
both civilian and military status.

The United States Military Code of Conduct

The United
States Military Code of Conduct, Articles III, for United
States service members who have been taken prisoner. They were
created in response to the breakdown of leadership which can happen
in a typical environment such as a POW situation, specifically when
US forces were POWs during the Korean
War. When a person is taken prisoner, the Code of Conduct
reminds the service member that the chain of command is still in
effect (the highest ranking service member, regardless of armed
service branch, is in command), and that the service member cannot
receive special favors or parole from their captors, lest this
undermine the service member's chain of command.

Since the Vietnam War the official U.S.
military term for enemy POWs is EPW (Enemy Prisoner of War). This
name change was introduced in order to distinguish between enemy
and U.S. captives. [4137], [4138]

World War I

American prisoners of war in Germany
in 1917.

During World War I about 8 million men surrendered and were held in
POW camps until the war ended. All nations pledged to follow the
Hague rules on fair treatment of prisoners of war, and in general
the POWs had a much higher survival rate than their peers who were
not captured. Individual surrenders were uncommon; usually a large
unit surrendered all its men. At Tannenberg 92,000 Russians surrendered during the
battle. When the besieged garrison of Kaunas surrendered
in 1915, 20,000 Russians became prisoners. Over half the
Russian losses were prisoners (as a proportion of those captured,
wounded or killed)s about 3.3 million men became prisoners.

German soldiers captured by the
British in Flanders

Germany
held 2.5 million prisoners; Russia held 2.9
million, and Britain and France held about 720,000, mostly
gained in the period just before the Armistice in 1918. The US held 48,000. The
most dangerous moment was the act of surrender, when helpless
soldiers were sometimes shot down. Once prisoners reached a POW
camp conditions were better (and often much better than in World
War II), thanks in part to the efforts of the International Red Cross and
inspections by neutral nations. There was however much harsh
treatment of POWs in Germany, as recorded by the American
ambassador to Germany (prior to America's entry into the war),
James W. Gerard, who published his findings in "My Four Years in
Germany". Even worse conditions are reported in the book "Escape of
a Princess Pat" by the Canadian George Pearson. It was particularly
bad in Russia, where starvation was common for prisoners and
civilians alike; about 40% of the prisoners in Russia died or
remained missing. Nearly 375,000 of the 500,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war taken by
Russians have perished in Siberia from
smallpox and typhus. In Germany food was short but only 5%
died.

The Ottoman Empire often treated
prisoners of war poorly. Some 11,800 British soldiers, most of them
Indians, became prisoners after the five-month Siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia, in April 1916. Many were weak and
starved when they surrendered and 4,250 died in captivity.

Release of prisoners

A Christmas greeting card sent home
by a German POW in the UK in 1918

At the end
of the war in 1918 there were believed to be 140,000 British
prisoners of war in Germany, including 3,000 internees held in
neutral Switzerland.The first
British prisoners were released and reached Calais on 15
November.Plans were made for them to be sent via
Dunkirk to Dover and a large
reception camp was established at Dover capable of housing 40,000
men, which could later be used for demobilisation.

On 13 December 1918 the armistice was extended and the Allies
reported that by 9 December 264,000 prisoners had been repatriated.
A very large number of these had been released en masse and sent
across Allied lines without any food or shelter. This created
difficulties for the receiving Allies and many released prisoners
died from exhaustion. The released POWs were met by cavalry troops and sent back through the lines in
lorries to reception centres where they were refitted with boots
and clothing and dispatched to the ports in trains. Upon arrival at
the receiving camp the POWs were registered and "boarded" before
being dispatched to their own homes. All commissioned officers had to write a
report on the circumstances of their capture and to ensure that
they had done all they could to avoid capture. Each returning
officer and man was given a message from King George V, written in his own
hand and reproduced on a lithograph. It read as follows:

World War II

Treatment of POWs by the Axis

The death toll among POWs in general is estimated at between 6 and
10 million. Germany and Italy generally treated prisoners from the
British Commonwealth,
France, the U.S. and other Western allies in accordance with the
Geneva Convention , which
had been signed by these countries. International Humanitarian Law—State Parties /
Signatories It is noteworthy that this also applied to Jewish POWs wearing the British Army's uniform, who were
treated on an equal footing with other British soldiers and
excluded from application of the murderous Final Solution policies effected against
virtually all other Jews who fell into Nazi hands. (For example, Major
Yitzhak Ben-Aharon—later a
prominent Israeli trade
unionist and politician—was captured by the Germans at Greece in
1941 and underwent four years of captivity under fairly tolerable
conditions).

In German
camps, when soldiers of lower rank were made to work, they were
compensated, and officers (e.g. in Colditz
Castle)
were not required to work. The main complaints of British,
British Commonwealth, U.S., and French prisoners of war in German Army POW camps-especially during the last
two years of the war-concerned the bare bones menu provided, a fate
German soldiers and civilians were also suffering due to the
blockade conditions. Fortunately for the
prisoners, food packages provided by the International Red Cross supplemented
the food rations, until the last few months when allied air raids
prevented shipments from arriving. The other main complaint was the
harsh treatment during forced marches in the last months, resulting
from German attempts to keep prisoners away from the advancing
allied forces.

Germany
did not apply the same standard of treatment to non-Western
prisoners, such as the many soldiers of the SovietRed Army, who suffered harsh conditions and died in
large numbers while in captivity. Between 1941 and 1945, the
Axis powers took about 5.7 million Soviet prisoners. About 1
million of them were released during the war, in that their status
changed but they remained under German authority. A little over
500,000 either escaped or were liberated by the Red Army. Some
930,000 more were found alive in camps after the war. The remaining
3.3 million prisoners (57.5% of the total captured) died during
their captivity. According to Russian military historian General
Grigoriy Krivosheyev, 4.6
million Soviet prisoners were taken by the Axis powers, of which
1.8 million were found alive in camps after the war and 318,770
were released by the Axis during the war and were then drafted into
the Soviet armed forces again. In comparison, 8,348 Western Allied
(British, American and Canadian) prisoners died in German camps in
1939-45 (3.5% of the 232,000 total).

An official justification used by the Germans for this policy was
that the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention. This
was not legally justifiable, however, as under article 82 of the
Geneva Convention ,
signatory countries had to give POWs of all signatory and
non-signatory countries the rights assigned by the convention.
Beevor indicates that about one month after
the German invasion in 1941 an offer was made by the USSR for a
reciprocal adherence to the Hague conventions. This
'note' was left unanswered by Third Reich officials. In contrast,
Tolstoy discusses that the German
Government as well as the International Red Cross made several
efforts to regulate reciprocal treatment of prisoners until early
1942, but received no answers from the Soviet side. Further, the
Soviets took a harsh position towards captured Soviet soldiers as
they expected each soldier to fight to the death and automatically
excluded any prisoner from the “Russian community”.

Australian and Dutch POWs at Tarsau,
Thailand in 1943

On 11
February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta
Conference,
the United States and the United Kingdom signed a Repatriation
Agreement with the USSR. The interpretation of this
Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Russians
(Operation Keelhaul) regardless
of their wishes. The forced repatriation operations took place in
1945-1947. Many Soviet POWs and forced
laborers transported to Nazi
Germany were on their return to the USSR treated as traitors
and sent to GULAG prison camps. The remainder
were barred from all but the most menial jobs.

Prisoners of war from China, the United States, Australia, Britain,
Canada, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Philippines
held by the Japanese armed forces were subject to murder, beatings,
summary punishment, brutal treatment, forced labor, medical
experimentation, starvation rations and poor medical treatment.
No access to the POWs was provided to the International Red Cross. Escapes
among Caucasian prisoners were almost impossible because of the
difficulty of men of Caucasian descent hiding in Asiatic
societies.

According to the findings of the Tokyo
tribunal, the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1%
(American POWs died at a rate of 37%), seven times that of POWs
under the Germans and Italians. The death rate of Chinese was much
larger. Thus, while 37,583 prisoners from the United Kingdom,
Commonwealth and Dominions, 28,500 from Netherlands and 14,473 from
USA were released after the surrender
of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56.

During the war the Armies of Allied nations such as the U.S., UK,
Australia and Canada were ordered to treat Axis prisoners strictly in
accordance with the Geneva
Convention . Some breaches of the Convention took place,
however. According to Stephen E.Ambrose, of the roughly 1,000
U.S. combat veterans that he had interviewed, roughly 1/3 told him
they had seen U.S. troops kill German prisoners.

Although some Japanese were taken prisoner, most fought until they
were killed or committed suicide. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers present
at the beginning of the Battle of Iwo
Jima, over 20,000 were killed and only 1,083 taken
prisoner.Of the 30,000 Japanese troops that defended
Saipan, less than
1,000 remained alive at battle's end. Japanese prisoners
sent to camps in the U.S. fared well but many Japanese were killed
when trying to surrender or were massacred just after they had
surrendered (see Allied war
crimes during World War II in the Pacific). Some Japanese
prisoners in POW camps died at their own hands, either directly or
by attacking guards with the intention of forcing the guards to
kill them.

Towards the end of the war in Europe, as large numbers of Axis
soldiers surrendered, the U.S. created the designation of Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF) so as not
to treat prisoners as POWs. A lot of these soldiers were kept in
open fields in various Rheinwiesenlagers. Controversy has arisen
about how Eisenhower managed these prisoners (see Other Losses). Many died when forced to
clear minefields in Norway, France etc. How many died during the
several post-war years that they were used for forced labor in France, the Soviet Union, etc,
is disputed. The "London Cage", a
MI19 prisoner of war facility in the UK during
and immediately after WWII, was subject to frequent allegations of
torture.

Regardless of regulations determining treatment to prisoners,
violations of their rights continue to be reported. Many cases of POW
massacres have been reported in recent times, including October 13 massacre in Lebanon by Syrian
forces and June
1990 massacre in Sri Lanka.

During the Gulf War in 1991, American, British, Italian and Kuwaiti
POWs (mostly crew members of downed aircraft and special forces)
were tortured by the Iraqi secret police. An American military
doctor, Major Rhonda Cornum, a 37-year-old flight surgeon, captured
when her Blackhawk UH60 was shot down was also subjected to sexual
abuse.

In 2001,
there were reports that India had actually
taken two prisoners during the Sino-Indian War, Yang Chen and Shih
Liang.The two were imprisoned as spies for three
years before being interned in a mental asylum in Ranchi, where they
spent the next 38 years under a special prisoner status. The
last prisoners of Iran–Iraq
War (1980-1988) were exchanged in 2003.

Occasionally, individual members of the U.S. Congress pushed for
action in regard to possible U.S. POWs from prior U.S. military
involvements and from the Cold War itself, with varying results.
One of
these was Republican Senator from North Carolina and ranking
minority member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
Jesse Helms in his efforts in behalf of
the World War II and Vietnam eras servicemen, as well as the
passengers and crew of Korean Air Lines
Flight 007, shot down by the Soviets on Sept. 1,
1983.